I’ve just finished speaking at a conference in Tulsa. The title of my “presentations”: The Vocabulary of Faith–re-thinking the sacred words of our faith (Gospel, Sin, and Heaven). My main script for this discussion is the Jesus Story according to Luke.

Gospel. We live in a “tournament of narratives.” The question is not whether one will choose to live in a particular story but rather, which story will we privilege (Jesus of Gospels, Jesus of our Own Image, etc.)? Luke’s first four verses (all one sentence in Greek if my memory is correct) provide a compelling insight into this question. While the gospel is partly Jesus’ atoning death for sins, it is also larger than that for Jesus himself constantly defined the gospel as the announcement that in him, a new way of being human was now possible (through forgiveness and the spirit). A story big and deep enough for everyone to find a place, to find good lines. Fred Craddock makes this point in a sermon when he talks about Scott Momaday and his journey, capturing the heart of Luke 1:1-4.

A Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and poet, also a Professor of Literature with a Ph.D. from Stanford, and a Kiowa Indian. When Momaday was a small boy, his father waked him early one morning and said, “I want you to get up, go with me.” His father took him by the hand and led him to the house of an old Indian squaw and left him; said “I’ll get you this afternoon.” All day long the old squaw of the Kiowa tribe told stories to the boy, sang songs to the boy, described rituals to the boy, told the history of the Kiowa to the boy. How they began out of a hollow log in the Yellowstone River, of the migration southward, telling the story of wars with other tribes, the great blizzards, the buffalo hunt, the coming of the White Man, the pressure and the war and the moving south, Kansas, privation, starvation, diminished tribe, finally Fort Sill, reservation, confinement. About dark, his father came and said, “Son, its time to go.” Momaday later looked back on that experience and said, “I left her house a Kiowa.” Craddock tells that story and then asks the question, “When children leave our church buildings do they leave Christian? Because to be Christian is to be enrolled in the story and anyone who can’t remember any farther back than his or her own birth is an orphan.” Anyone who can’t remember any farther back than his or her own birth is an orphan. When our children leave our church buildings do they leave Christian? Is this where they learn who they are?